Why Do We Need Politicians Anyway?

Politicians have never had a good reputation. More than 2000 years ago, Aesop noted, “We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.” Robin Hood is still a folk hero. The great barons, the rich abbots and the powerful esquires are still the bad guys.

Webster’s second definition of politician, “A person primarily interested in political offices from selfish or other narrow interests,” resonates far more than the first, “A person experienced in the art and science of government.”

A large majority of adults believe elected officials are not doing a good job. Only four percent of those who participated in a recent PEW Research Center study said our political system is working well. Almost nine out of ten said elected officials are more focused on fighting each other than on solving problems and don’t care what people like them think.

When asked to describe American politics in a single word or phrase, only two percent had a positive response. Words offered most often were: divisive, corrupt, messy, broken, dysfunctional, terrible, disgusting, disgrace.

With that kind of report card, we might well ask if we would be better off without politicians.

But could we do without them? Somebody has to do what the job description says politicians are supposed to do – figuring out how, with all of our differences, we can live together in relative harmony.

The idea that politics makes living together possible goes back at least to Aristotle. The alternative, he said, is conflict. Moderation and restraint were both moral virtues and conditions of political stability. “Some people, believing that their own view of goodness is the only right one, push that view to extremes. . . . [States] have been destroyed by means of legislation carried to excess.”

Aristotle advised oligarchies, controlled by the rich and wellborn, and democracies, controlled by the majority who are not well off, that when they are in control they should pursue not only their own interests but also take care of the needs of the other. When neither “sets up a constitution fair and acceptable all round” the result is “constant strife and civil war.”

Even Machiavelli, the philosopher of power politics, advised accommodation. “Wise princes have studied diligently not to drive the nobles to desperation, and to satisfy the populace and keep it contented.”

In his unusual book In Defense of Politics, Bernard Crick, describes what the practice of politics should look like and why it is essential. He writes, “Politics is the practical reconciliation of interests; not a set of fixed principles to be realized. … Politics is the attempt to find particular and workable solutions to the perpetual and shifty problem of conciliation.”

To renounce politics is to “destroy the very thing …which enables us to enjoy variety without suffering either anarchy or the tyranny of single truths. … The struggle for power is the struggle for power – it is not politics.”

We are where we are today in America because too many politicians have abandoned politics to pursue power to impose their own truth. In the process, they have failed to deliver what people most want.

What do we want? The rebel authors of the Declaration of Independence wrote forcefully that the purpose of government is to ensure life, liberty, and happiness. Qianlong, the longest ruling emperor of China who held the throne for sixty-one years from 1735 to 1796, would add harmony and prosperity. For Aristotle, stability was important.

Safety, liberty, happiness, harmony, prosperity, and stability. Should be simple. It’s not. The human element intervenes. In pursuing our own liberty, happiness, and prosperity, we impinge on the liberty, happiness and prosperity of others.

Playing loud music at 2 a.m. wakes the neighbors. Not wearing a mask during a pandemic puts the health of others at risk. When those who run the economy claim most of the increase in national income, the bottom half which has seen no increase in real income since 1980 is left struggling.

Freedom, happiness and prosperity are all shared goods. We each want a larger piece. We bump into each other. We clash. Politics sets boundaries. Says my freedom to act the way I want ends where your nose begins. When politics is done well, when conflicting interests are accommodated, when problems are solved, a level of harmony and stability can be achieved.

That requires skill. It is not easy. It is not the way politics is played today.

Even when I was in the legislature 50 years ago, much of the political maneuvering was motivated by the desire to pin blame for inaction on the other party. To have something to attack them with, rather than to solve a problem and make lives better.

We saw that motivation in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election. After a lot of effort, a bipartisan majority in Congress agreed to significant changes to fix immigration. Trump, who has made attacking migrants and the problems with immigration the centerpiece of his political career, persuaded enough Republicans to abandon the effort and scuttle it.

It is much easier to run against problems, to stir up all the anger and anxiety problems cause, than it is to fix them. Those who don’t like the way things are don’t have to agree on why. They can be against for many different reasons. To fix problems, however, there has to be agreement on a specific solution. That is much more difficult.

Democrats, who see government and politics as a way to fix problems and make our lives better, have a much steeper hill to climb than the Republicans, who over the past several decades have chosen to become the anti-government party and rely on gathering all the disaffected into one coalition and thereby win elections.

Ronald Reagan set the tone in his first inaugural address. “Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem.” Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform and a longtime conservative leader, reflects the Party’s current mindset. The goal is to “take government down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

Dividing us is part of the strategy. There is always an enemy against whom prejudice and anger can be enflamed and channeled. Currently it is migrants and the transgender community. Among those targeted in the past have been war protesters, flag burners and ‘welfare queens’. The politics of No is much easier than the politics of Yes. You don’t have to fix anything, just point the finger and complain loudly.

The politics of Yes has its own pitfalls. The most common is to believe so strongly in your own rightness it is easy to dismiss the legitimacy of other experience and other thinking, making conversation, connection, and building a coalition large enough to get something done difficult.

It is easy to fall prey to the temptation. Much of the Monday-morning quarterbacking of the presidential campaign just finished has focused on the perceived elitism of Democrats and the shift in Party membership from lower income to higher income, from less educated to more educated, from renters to home owners.

When you Know what is best for people, the temptation to prescribe your remedy without first listening to their knowledge, their experience, and their thinking is hard to resist. If your way is the Best, and you are Right, settling for something less is to abandon principle.

Insisting on complete agreement only alienates those who might be with you some of the way. Rep. Sarah McBride, D-Delaware, the first openly trans member of Congress, makes that point forcefully in a long recent interview with Ezra Klein in the New York Times.

“We’ve lost the art of persuasion. We’ve lost the art of change-making over the last couple of years … we forgot that in a democracy we have to grapple with where the public authentically is and actually engage with it.”

For McBride, negotiating takes place with the public, not Republican politicians. “When you recognize that distinction, I think it allows for a pragmatic approach that has, in my mind, the best possible chance of shifting public opinion as quickly as possible.”

The conversation has to engage people where they are. “If we get too far out ahead, we lose our grip on public opinion, and we can no longer bring it with us.” We have to “walk people to a place.”

That requires “space for disagreement within your own coalition … you can’t change people if you exclude them.” In the political struggle for same sex marriage “the most effective messengers were the people who had evolved themselves.”

“We had grace personified in that movement” McBride said, “and it worked beyond even the advocate’s wildest expectations … we created space for people to grow, and we allowed people into our tent, into that conversation who weren’t already with us.”

The politics of respect, accommodation and inclusion is effective politics. Winning politics. The larger the tent, the warmer the welcome, the more will gather.